2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Reimagining Engineering Education and its integration with Research and Innovation - IDEELab

Presented at College Industry Partnerships Division (CIP) Technical Session 3

In the twenty-first century, humanity has reached a level of technological appreciation in which even marginal improvements command extraordinary economic value. Consumers willingly pay a premium for incremental gains in speed, convenience, connectivity, or performance. As a result, economic impact scales with technological advancement, so that even a modest early lead can translate into dominance across entire industries, leaving other nations economically locked out through irreversible losses of talent, investment, and supply chains. In these winner-takes-all markets, America faces an unprecedented global rivalry that threatens its long-held preeminence as the vanguard of technology.
At the heart of this struggle lies engineering education. The next generation of technological creators must be cultivated not as passive learners of closed-ended methods, but as active inventors capable of transforming open-ended problems into tangible solutions. Preparing students to innovate, think critically, build creatively, and collaborate across disciplines has become a national imperative. Yet while technology is conceived, matured, and deployed in industry, industry contributes on average only about six percent to university research and development, leaving academic programs structurally detached from the primary environment of innovation. As a result, students graduate with strong theoretical foundations but limited readiness to participate effectively in modern innovation cycles.
This paper introduces a novel model implemented within the Innovation Design and Engineering Education Laboratory, IDEELab, to bridge this divide by embedding industry physically within the educational ecosystem. Industry partners conduct high-value technology innovation projects alongside faculty, undergraduate, and graduate students inside IDEELab. In this co-productive environment, industry derives substantial value by collaborating with a new breed of faculty and students to develop novel technologies and engineering solutions on university premises. From these active innovation efforts, rigorous real-world class projects are derived and integrated across the undergraduate curriculum. In this structure, industry innovation generates curriculum content, ensuring that classroom learning is continuously driven by authentic development. Such engagement accelerates students’ transition into the professional world and reestablishes universities as engines of technological renewal, vital to restoring the United States’ leadership in the global innovation landscape.
For this model to succeed, we fundamentally reengineered university processes, policies, and incentives. The existing system, rooted in federally driven R&D priorities, proved incompatible with sustained industry collaboration. As we transition to a paradigm in which the student is the customer of the university and industry is the customer of the student, new incentive frameworks emerged: Faculty of Innovation and Graduate Innovation Assistants. Their success is measured not only by publications, but by intellectual property creation, engineering impact, and industry partnership outcomes, aligning academic purpose with the nation’s innovation imperative.

Authors

Dr. Haitham El Kadiri Mississippi State University [biography]

With MS and PhD degrees earned from the prestigious Paris Tech (Ecole des Mines de Paris), Dr.
El Kadiri has more than 25 years of experience in research in the field of Materials Science and
Engineering with a focus on both Physical and Mechanical Metallurgy of materials microstructures
behavior and formation. He authored and co-authored over 130 papers in high-impact journals, 3
patents, and 1 startup companies since 2004, which are recognized in the scientific community by an
h-index of 45 with over 6636 citations. Dr. El Kadiri has led several teams in the area of multiscale
modeling applied to several contemporary industrial and scientific challenges. He has been
sponsored by various agencies such as NSF, DoD, and DoE, as well as multiple industries, with over
$20MM in funded research and development projects. Projects included efforts to capture within a
crystal plasticity framework plasticity phenomena related to deformation twinning in hexagonal
metals, molecular dynamics, designing 3rd generation steels involving martensitic transformation,
and high-temperature oxidation. He has a passion to identify mechanisms governing metallurgical
evolving system through a fundamental understanding supported by combined characterization and
modeling at the small scale and the mesoscale.
He is now the Director of the Michael W. hall School of Mechanical Engineering, and PACCAR Endowed Chair Professor with a vision to partner
with industries to improve the undergraduate curriculum and train students on how to create and
produce market-viable technologies. As department head, he has contributed to raise more than
$40MM in gifts and awards. He has a passion to formulate a long-term vision in research and service
to the student, the broader communities, and the economy.
Dr. David M. Ford http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8595-3542 Mississippi State University [biography]

David M. Ford is Dean of the Bagley College of Engineering at Mississippi State University. He earned a B.S. degree from the University at Buffalo and M.S.E. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, all in chemical engineering. Dr. Ford spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at Sandia National Laboratories before starting as a faculty member in the Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University in 1997, where he received the Department of Energy Defense Programs Early Career Scientist and Engineer Award and the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). He subsequently held various professorial and administrative positions at UMass Amherst and the University of Arkansas Fayetteville, and he served as Dean of the College of Science and Engineering at Central Michigan University from 2021-25. Dr. Ford’s main research areas are statistical thermodynamics, simulations of molecular and colloidal systems, and membrane-based separations. He has also led federally funded programs to increase transfer students' graduation rates and re-envision engineering curricula, and he co-founded the InSCiTE program at Central Michigan University.
Dalton Ross Smith Mississippi State University

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